HubSpot Expands to Sales: Tools your Team will Want to Use

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With over 10,000 attendees (including our Dechay Watts, Debbie Williams and Chris Hawkins) at HubSpot’s annual INBOUND 2014 conference this week, we were expecting big things. After all, at last year’s conference the marketing platform announced a Content Optimization System that revolutionized the way we thought about web design and content management. Today’s announcement is just as exciting.

Just minutes ago in Boston, CEO Brian Halligan broke the news of a brand new product, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool.

"We started HubSpot because we felt the way consumers shop and buy had fundamentally changed. The inbound movement has helped transform the world of marketing, and we really feel like there's a huge opportunity to transform the customer experience with sales technology that enables companies to sell more, better, and faster," said Halligan.

HubSpot’s new CRM is designed to address the shift of power from seller to buyer in today’s subscription-focused economy. Think about it. We rent movies and TV shows from Netflix, get our music from Pandora and in bigger cities, even share cars through Zipcar. The buyer now has all of the power. That means salespeople must be hand holders instead of arm twisters.

"The traditional sales process is broken. Instead of "always be closing," the next generation of sales leads will "always be helping," said Halligan.

HubSpot hopes to help small businesses without CRMs achieve this with its new tool. From logging emails, recording calls and managing data, it’s an integrated platform which will free up your sales team from admin tasks so they can focus on conducing sales.

"Traditional sales technology is necessary but not sufficient. HubSpot's Sales Platform is designed to arm sales teams with the context they need to improve how they engage with companies, prospects, and leads to drive sales instead of driving people crazy," said Halligan.

The CRM integrates seamlessly into the HubSpot platform, so if you are a HubSpot partner, the interface should already be familiar to your team. The two systems will share information from web pages, forms, emails, social media and phone calls. All contact information from the marketing product will be synced in the lead record in the CRM. At the same time, information from the CRM will be available in the marketing product to use for lead nurturing and reporting. That means sales and marketing teams can actually share information and work together, rather than in their own bubbles.

The new CRM organizes interaction without manual input. So, instead of logging sales calls, your team can focus on making sales. No longer will paper or post-it notes pile up on your desk. In fact, one of the new features allows a sales rep to call a lead right from their computer which will record the call so they can reference it later.

The HubSpot CRM will first be released on a limited basis to customers and eventually will be offered for FREE to everyone in 2015.

But the CRM wasn’t the only star today. HubSpot also announced a bevy of new inbound marketing features, including:

Editorial Calendar

As a content marketing agency, we are jumping for joy at this new feature! HubSpot has built an editorial calendar so editors can manage content production and assign tasks in a streamlined way. We can’t wait to start using this calendar for our clients and ourselves.

Anonymous Personalization

It’s no secret that HubSpot’s COS allows a personalized web experience to users. But until now, it was only possible with actual contacts. Now, you can deliver targeted web content to first-time visitors to your website. There’s a lot to be said about this ability, but at first glance, we see this best used in delivering different content depending on the device the visitor is using.

Better Reporting

From attribution to revenue, big advancements are being made in HubSpot’s analytics which allows marketers to better understand what’s working and what’s not.

Email Optimizer

Optimize your messages right in the HubSpot tool, which will now provide advice on sending, subject and body as you create your emails.

Branching Logic

This new feature enables marketers to take their workflows even farther. The idea is that these advanced workflows can adapt and change depending upon the action a recipient takes with your email. For example, if someone ignored your email, you can send them a different message than those who opened your email get.

Updated Social Inbox

We were already big fans of HubSpot’s Social Inbox tool because it allows us to manage all of our social media accounts in one place. But with a new promise of “taming the social media beast in 20 minutes a day,” we’re all ears!